Downvotes = “I disagree” or “this is bad and you should feel bad”?
I think I’ve settled on the latter. Disagreement is maybe best communicated by the absence of an upvote? And downvotes work best when they signal something that is just off base, and while not reportable, is not appreciated at a broad cultural level.
I think someone else mentioned the same here, but as I’ve browsed down the opinions, I wonder if it’s good for different communities to have their own subculture on what votes mean.
For sure, outsiders dropping by might vote ‘counter-culturally’ and unhelpfully, but you can get a general sense of understanding in a community.
For r/all-alike stuff I’m sure things are different.
It doesn’t have to be a button. Just let users see how many other users saw their comment. If a user scrolls into the comments section and stops on my comment for a second or two, that counts as a read.
Alternatively, tally up the total number of user-seconds spent viewing my comment. Or maybe an average. Just something that lets me know I’m not a ghost!
Course I have my own biases but. I don’t want to see people get downvoted for saying things I don’t like just because I don’t like it. Also anyone who downvotes honest questions is just being mean.
Lol, point taken. It has to be an actual rebuttal, and I guess that does take time. Downvoting everything you don’t immediately agree with seems like a bad policy, though.
I am not some teacher grading essays and giving points for good structure.
That’s exactly my point. You are not the ultimate judge of what is good and what is bad. I’m not telling you to upvote things you disagree with, I’m simply telling you to not downvote unless it’s clearly not relevant.
All of your comments on this thread are good comments that I disagree with. Sometimes, disagreement leads to growth.
Same, and also “this has already been said in this thread. You should have upvoted the existing comment.” Basically a tool to improve signal-to-noise ratio of the discussion.
On Reddit, up/down was intended to be used as relevant or not relevant. Then Facebook came around with the Like button and changed the standard.
Coming from the perspective of Digg, Reddit was about sharing external content and giving something an upvote was used to promote that content while a downvote was used to discourage that content from being seen. It was democratic in that the users were relied on for ranking posts without the need for moderators having to establish rules and remove things.
Then Reddit employed an algorithm and most people visit Popular and All making it a shitstorm of irrelevance. People upvote stuff they like that has absolutely no reason to be posted in a sub. Never mind everything that’s gone on with Reddit in recent months, it’s users’ inability to properly use the upvote / downvote buttons that has caused the site to become absolute trash.
Here, we have the added tool of the Star to indicate that we like something while at the same time downvoting it because it’s not relevant to the sub. The problem is that the vast majority of people don’t want to think about or put any effort into anything. At this point, anything that looks like a thumbs up is getting selected because they like it.
If you disagree with someone, you shouldn’t do anything unless you have something to say. Engage with them in conversation and express your point of view - this is “social media”. If others feel your point is relevant you should get an upvote; if you’re off topic you should get a downvote.
Reading over the other comments here, I think most people are expressing a similar perspective. It’s about rankings, not feelings.
Disagreement is maybe best communicated by the absence of an upvote?
There is a quote “You can not not communicate” but on the internet you can. If I get no upvotes, I don’t know if no one has seen it or people actively ignored it and it’s a bad advice to feel disagreed on when no upvotes.
I personally feel frustrated when I get downvotes but no comments because I don’t know why I’m downvoted. Some instances here in the lemmyverse (like mine) don’t have downvotes enabled so I don’t even see downvotes.
I think it’s best to engage in a conversation if you disagree in a constructive way and downvote without comment if you feel this is beyond help.
The thing is, downvotes mean whatever the person downvoting feels like they mean. Personally I don’t downvote anything, only upvote.
It would be interesting to have a bot that looks for bad actors—by that I mean users who abuse the downvote and do not use it the way the community agrees that it means. And have a mod review and take action if necessary.
Sad part of the design is that I need to interact with a post to get it off my feed so if it’s an some stupid meme or whatever i just downvote and move on to clear up all the repeats.
The setting is off by default but you turn on hide post after interaction in the settings.
Like if you downvote everything you don’t upvote, it almost doesn’t have an effect because all those things are equally bearing one new downvote and hence don’t change sort precedence with each other.
Agreed. The function of the down vote is to deprioritize that post/comment. People should use the down vote when they want to deprioritize that post/comment.
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